1. Technical Field
The invention relates to systems for the disposition of data. More specifically, the invention relates to a method and apparatus for handling edge-cases of event-driven disposition.
2. Description of the Related Art
Business organizations retain electronic documents, records and other data in storage for extended periods of time for a number of reasons including easy access, internal policy, and regulation compliance, among other various reasons. For instance, government regulation may require an organization to retain certain securities information for a given duration for SEC compliance. Likewise, some organizations retain electronic records of documents for audit and/or litigation purposes.
Some known data storage systems involve storing data with an associated retention mark. The retention mark indicates a time period for the retention of the data and when the time period lapse, the data is typically disposed of automatically. Currently, a system administrator must manually manipulate the retention for a given datum when the retention is triggered by an external event. Organizations managing a large amount of stored data incur time-consuming and costly expenses in performing the updating and data disposition manually.
Furthermore, an error in data disposition may result in dire consequences. For instance, in cases where data was not disposed of, too much data has been disposed of, or wrong data has been disposed of, an organization may incur unwanted legal and business consequences. Therefore, there is a need in eliminating human factor from data disposition as much as possible.
There is no uniform view on how to manage disposition of data. This needs to be changed to get under control growing storage and legal costs associated with storing unnecessary information.
Different types of data is associated with different retention schedules, i.e. rules describing how long the information should be preserved in a certain data source, what is the event that triggers measuring of the disposition period, and what should be done with the information when the disposition period is due.
The methods of automatic event driven disposition described in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/164,468, filed on Jun. 30, 2008, published as United States Patent Publication No. 2009/0328070 and the methods of handling files on hold described in aU.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/164,524, filed on Jun. 30, 2008, published as United States Patent Publication No. 2009/0326969, now U.S. Pat. No. 7,792,945 address the functionality of an Information Lifecycle Management System that automatically disposes of the documents in multiple data sources that may be a subject for a legal hold. However, they do not provide expected results when it comes to:                Making sure that documents that have been on hold during the execution of a disposition request are disposed of according to their retention schedules after they have been released from hold. Hereinafter, we use the term “Disposition Survivors” for these documents.        Making sure that disposition of documents including Disposition Survivors is handled properly in scenarios when a retention schedule changes        Making sure past events are handled properly.        
It would be advantageous to provide a method and apparatus for handling edge-cases of event-driven disposition.